Nuclear crisis despair turned to joy

November 01, 2012|Paul Carpenter

Painful perspectives came together in Pennsylvania two weeks ago during a "May This Never Happen Again" forum at Bucks County Community College.

One perspective was expressed by two natives of Japan, survivors of the horrors of the 1945 bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A second was from the grandson of the U.S. president who authorized them.

A third painful perspective was not on the forum's program but it came from a crisis that ended 50 years ago this week.

It came from me, because I once worked on nuclear weapons and had a front-row seat for what easily could have turned into a nuclear Armageddon — the Cuban Missile Crisis and DEFCON 2, a military term that meant being on the doorstep of a global nightmare.

In 1962, very few people knew how close we came to a nuclear conflagration, and I was one of them, as I've reported on other occasions, including the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 1995.

I'll get back to that, but the community college forum featured Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow, now living in Toronto, and Nagasaki survivor Yasuaki Yamashita, now in Mexico. The third speaker was Clifton Truman Daniel of Independence, Mo., the eldest grandson of President Harry Truman.

Thurlow and Yamashita gave harrowing accounts of their experiences, each of which began with a blinding flash of light.

Thurlow was 13 when her city was incinerated on Aug. 6, 1945. After moving to Canada she became a prominent activist against the "atrocity" of nuclear weapons.

Yamashita was 6 when Nagasaki was hit. His father worked to help clear debris, and later died of radiation-related ailments and burns. Yamashita also has been active in speaking against nuclear weapons.

Daniel has written two books about his grandfather, and now, after visiting both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is writing a third book on the survivors. He also has worked to help achieve a nuclear-free world.

I wrote about the community college forum in advance, in an Oct. 14 column, and did not anticipate writing about it further. But Daniel said he had talked with his grandfather about the decision to use those weapons, and the former president said it had been necessary to end the war.

That is something with which I strongly disagree, partly because of my background.

Before Hiroshima, U.S. military leaders knew Japan was seeking to surrender. They had broken secret codes and knew that Japan was negotiating diplomatically through the Soviet Union, which at that point was not at war with Japan.

The Soviets, however, wanted to grab territory north of Japan and could do so only after declaring war, so they did not forward the surrender overtures. The American military leaders, particularly Gen. Curtis LeMay, knew about all that but wanted to try out their new weapon.

So Hiroshima came on Aug. 6, 1945, and the Soviets declared war two days later, allowing them to grab oil-rich Sakhalin north of Japan and other territory. Japan announced its surrender on Aug. 15, 1945.

As I was listening to the comments by the forum's three speakers, and then questions from the audience, I got involved because one of the questions involved plutonium, which was used in the Nagasaki bomb.

It turned out that I was the only one there who knew the answer, and that led to some other comments by me about another nuclear attack that almost happened, again with LeMay ferociously demanding it. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis, with which I was intimately familiar.

I told about my flight from Okinawa, Japan, to Kunsan Air Base in South Korea, in a transport plane loaded with "bird cages," the containers for the plutonium cores of nuclear bombs. That was at the start of the crisis on Oct. 22, 1962, as the military prepared to shift to DEFCON 2.

I had worked on those weapons since 1957 and this was the first time we seriously configured them for use. At the forum, I raised my hand with thumb and forefinger an inch apart to illustrate how close the world had come to Armageddon.

I also described how I was overwhelmed with despair as we flew over the East China Sea toward Korea, convinced I'd never see my wife and three little children again. They were on Okinawa, which had the heaviest concentration of American military might in the world, and would be the main retaliatory target of the Chinese and Russians after we nuked them.

I pointed to my wife, also a native of Japan, who went to the forum with me, and it got pretty difficult to talk because of my 50-year-old emotions. So I sat down.

There are, however, other emotions. Today is the 50th anniversary of one of the happiest days of my life — when I boarded a C-47 Gooney Bird for a flight from Kunsan to Tachikawa Air Base, near Tokyo.

That was after I spent more than a week preparing weapons to be loaded on the F-84 fighter-bombers at Kunsan. Then the bombs were unloaded as the crisis subsided and I made plans to catch that C-47.

People need to know how close we came in 1962, and how it's possible to experience that again, especially now that the world has tens of thousands of such weapons, many of them hundreds of times as powerful as the ones dropped on Japan.